Undoing Maleficent

To say the announcement that Disney is working on a new, live action film adaptation of their most revered villain, Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty sent shockwaves through the internet would be an enormous understatement. Reactions ranged from excited to ecstatic, with virtually everybody (at least within the range of cartoon enthusiasts, feminist, and feminist cartoon enthusiasts I spend much of my time with) thrilled at the idea of one of Disney’s most beloved creatures of wickedness getting the chance to tell her full story. But even as I shared in the excitement, I couldn’t help to thinking back to another story that had given a similarly ghoulish green witch a chance to tell her tale – Wicked, the book musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West got as wicked as she is. And after that, I remembered the existence of two pieces of media that explored the origins of famous heroines, namely Nintendo’s Metroid: Other M and Square Enix’s 2013 remake of the Tomb Raider series. Through all these works, we see two specific themes: the subject matter of a popular and critically acclaimed female subject, who has succeeded whether through the force of her character or her execution, and the need to redress this character, to explore who she is and how she became the person we know her as. And perhaps instinctively, this realization gave me a queasy feeling. Sure, it’s great to get character backstories, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary? Is it just an attempt to flesh out characters that may have only ever been seen as villains, or is there a more salient urge here, to strip female heroes and villains alike of their mystery and autonomy and make them explain themselves to us? From this perspective, it seems necessary to ask what it is that the new Malificient film does; does it validate her, giving us an idea of why she is who she is, or does it undo her, removing the excess villainy and mystery that made her at once so captivating and inspiring to viewers?

Didn’t she play Lara Croft too? Or am I just losing it…

Like a male hero or villain, there are myriad reasons a female hero or villain may succeed, or fail, in their given function. But unlike most male characters, female characters are also caught up in the complex politics of representation and sexualization, and must be interrogated with pointed questions to determine whether they break down sexist stereotypes or uphold them. Upholding the institutions of sexism is done in ways that range from outfits to motivations; if the heroine or villainess wears the same three loose pieces of cloth everywhere she goes, she’s demeaning eye candy for men, and if her motivations are for romance, wealth, or eternal beauty, she’s a damsel, a conniving harpy, or any one of the literal hundreds of pre-formed molds made for female characters of all shapes and DnD alignments. To escape this is no easy task, for it requires simultaneously the recognition of the female character’s specific social position while also being clear to point out that her gender changes nothing about her basic human motives, objectives and desires. In this sense, characters like Maleficent and Samus Aran of the Metroid game succeed; their motivations do not rest in anything directly coded as feminine, but simply in who they are as human beings (or in Maleficent’s case, fairies). And while Elphaba and Lara Croft no doubt fulfill sexist functions (in the case of the former, being a vindictive hag and in the latter, being eye candy for 13 year olds with a PlayStation) their characters seem to exist and have motives for action outside of them. From craving treasure to craving vengeance, acting out of senses of duty, honor, wickedness and for the thrill of it, the motivations of these women are not wholly contingent on their gender; anyone in Elphaba’s position would want to avenge their sister, and the tropes of bold and brash treasure hunter like Lara Croft is as common as the adventure genre itself. And more importantly, the motivations of these characters don’t really need to be qualified; we have seen enough villains and heroes with them to not so much bat an eye at them. Does this drive to qualify the motivations of female characters represent a drive to strip them of their character nuances, as if we as viewers have trouble believing that they, as female characters, are capable of doing the things they do without qualifying it?

Is it really necessary to know how this became this?

With Maleficent in particular, this question is troubling. More than any of the previously outlined characters, Maleficent triumphs not because she is a character so much as she is a symbol, an awe-inspiring avatar of wickedness and malevolence in semi-human form. This is what, in the already impressive pantheon of comic, tragic and wicked villains of the Disney canon, makes her stand out as above and beyond the rest. The average Disney villain may have myriad motivations and reasons for being evil, be they jealousy, gluttony, old grudges or simple dislike of the protagonist. But Maleficent is above such petty mortal concerns. It is true that she is slighted in not being invited to Princess Aurora’s Christening, but this seems little more than pretext for her to unleash her evils upon the kingdom. And were it not for the meddling of the “good” fairies, she would have succeeded; by the films halfway point, she has the prince in chains, the princess in eternal sleep, and the kingdom completely plunged in darkness. Further, she never relies on the powers of her minions to get things done: for the most part, it is her who does the plotting, the trapping, and most of all the fighting, and she does it damn well. By the film’s final act, she has become evil itself, manifesting as an enormous black dragon capable of leveling entire kingdoms, before good triumphs and she is finally slain once and for all. Even as she loses, she stands out in a way no villain has before or since. Maleficent is a force of nature, an awe inspiring manifestation of villainy in its purest, most captivating form, and it is in the very force of her evil and power that she has emerged as the perennial, classic villain of the Disney mythos.

According to the Wikipedia page for the new Maleficent film, our favorite evil fairy is being recast as a defender of nature and wildlife from the encroaching forces of man. Is this how far the mighty have fallen? The dark lady Maleficent, a militant Greenpeace activist? Forgive me if I don’t sound too enthused. In some cases, fleshing out the ideas of female villains and heroes gives them an extra bit of dimension they previously lacked; with Wicked especially, we got to see an arresting and ultimately convincing portrait of the Wicked Witch, with her origins as dreamy idealist and the way the corruption of the world she lived in made her something far worse. But this recent spate of female backstories too often seems to ask questions that don’t need to be asked, namely why do these characters, characters we already know and care about, act the way they do? For Maleficent this is a pointless line of inquiry. Maleficent has never operated on the basis of everyday logic and passions, for if she did she wouldn’t be a fire breathing sorceress living in a rickety castle in the darkest, creepiest corner of the Earth. What makes Maleficent a gripping character is not who she is, but what she represents. She is evil incarnate, angry, spiteful, cunning and all-encompassing evil, and the fact that she happens to manifest this in a female form seems to make little difference. But in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.

So, I ultimately pose this question; is a new Maleficent film really necessary? Do we have to create a backstory for a character who’s more a force of nature than anything, and deconstruct everything she represents to a world where powerful female symbols are already rare to nonexistent? In undoing Maleficent and other female characters like her, are we selling them short, and telling them that we don’t believe that they can be gripping, powerful and meaningful on their own terms?

My answer to this is yes. Rather than revisiting classic female characters, it seems a much better use of the time and energy of writers and artists everywhere to build off of them, to learn from their mistakes and appreciate their impact, and create new, dynamic characters that through their actions destroy expectations of gender and all related institutions. Rather than undoing Maleficent, we should champion her cause, and learn from the things she has taught us about character designing and building. If we do not do this, moving forward will only become more difficult, and the mistakes of the past will just keep repeating themselves.

15 Comments

Great piece. I share your concerns about revisionism– whether its Bates Motel or Malificent, and think that fairy tale revisionism has become very tired. But I disagree that Malificent’s evil isn’t gendered.

Femininity has been coded as darkness for a long time– ‘yang,’ to man’s lightness, ‘yin.’ Yang is not coded as evil, and is rather associated with death, night, moon, water, blood, birth, earth and darkness. There are strong parallels in Greek mythology, or the Egyptian gods. The Sun Gods are coded male and govern the living. Female gods have an incredible amount of power, but govern the murky, the unknown and threatening. Christianity borrowed from these archetypes (The cult of Isis became the worship of Mary, etc.), and severed the more positive aspects like ‘birth,’ and ‘harvest,’ from ‘death’ and ‘darkness,’ now consigned to the devil, who inherits traditionally feminine qualities while being male. So, to me it makes sense that the most ‘evil’ of Disney’s villains would be women (Ursula also has a gigantic transformation at the end of Little Mermaid,) while the men would be pettier. They are only participating in feminine darkness- the women ARE feminine darkness.
Looking at Christian iconography brings us to Arthurian Legend, and its accompanying revision of a demonized woman– the Mists of Avalon. It sounds like Disney is making a children’s version of this book, (nature worship, the encroachment of man, winners write history,) which is weird, but I’m interested in the results. Mists of Avalon was fantastically successful feminist retelling of the oppression of Camelot, and destruction of ancient harmonies and feminine power, and it predates the revisions you mention above. Disney has marched in the Christian-imagery, light-is-right, (and white is right) camp for so long, so it’s a strange story for them to co-opt. There’s a chance that they will get it very very wrong.

“s, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary?”

This article strikes me as a stretch. The more a franchise runs, the greater the odds that someone is going to explore a back story further as they grasp for ideas. This doesn’t strike me as gendered.

Thinking of Lora Croft-Indiana Jones 3 does something similar- explaining how his father was an archaeologist and how he got his iconic hat- none of that strikes me as as different type from fleshing out Laura Croft.

The Tomb Raider reboot was compared to Batman Begins, which again, goes into greater detail on how he became Batman, not just showing dead parents, but who invented his gadgets and who trained him to be a ninja.

In fact is most fictional characters start out as just a basic concept, and the writer gradually ads to it over time, whether in the course of writing a book or in the course of serialized fiction.

Looking at Samus- Mario was originally just a simple protagonist called “jump man” then he goes from protagonist to antagonist in Donkey Kong Jr., switches from a carpenter to a plumber in Mario Brothers, with most of the details of his world only added in Super Mario Brothers.

Recent projects like Wicked would appear to descend from stories like Grendel or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, none of which feature female villains as the redeemed characters. (How about Fables, showing the cause of the amorality of the Big Bad Wolf?)

Even Nintendo has done this with male villains, the Donkey Kong Country series and Donkey Kong JR redeem the villainous monkey (or at least his son) as a good guy. The Disney film Wreck it Ralph is another revisionist take on Donkey Kong, this time via a pastiche.

How many revisionist Dracula stories have been done at this point?

Even old comics like The Killing Joke arguably fit this role, justifying a character that could have been see as a force of nature.

Pallas’ comment here is interesting– perhaps this revision is in line with the ‘Frozen’ philosophy, where there are no villains, and Disney is gently ret-conning them all into misunderstood good-guys (and thus much more licensable.)

“These are the same people for whom that gawdawful live-action Jim Carrey Grinch movie was made — you know, the one that explored the Grinch’s tragic backstory as a way of explaining his hatred for Who-ville and Christmas and the whole schmeer. Made by grown-ups, for grown-ups, to answer the “questions” that no actual child is stupid enough to ask.

Children understand (perhaps without articulating it) that character like the Grinch or Skeletor is best seen as a force of nature, and that questioning their motives is about as useful as trying to psychoanalyze a hurricane.”

He’s talking about a bunch of things that he has seen (Wicked, Lara Croft), as well as pointing to the plot details now available…which do in fact sound pretty thoroughly godawful. Maybe he’ll be pleasantly surprised, but there’s nothing wrong in talking about his concerns.

This statement, in particular, resonates with me and (I assume) punctuates your essay:

“… in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.”

If the subconscious intent is a sort of good-washing of this magnificently pure villain, then that is unsettling. Thus part of me agrees that the film could undercut the existing validity of the character.

So, to your question of whether a Maleficent film is necessary, perhaps not. But I do think it is important.

Whether or not it is a critical success, this film and this character matter because we haven’t yet reached the tipping point for female characterization in mainstream media. We haven’t even reached the tipping point for a balanced number of female-led mainstream movies.

I think the goal of your essay is noble, and how nice it would be if producers, writers and actors spun their wheels instead on progressive, quality characters, no matter the gender identity. But Maleficent still matters, very much. And this fangirl also happens to be looking forward to it … very much.

As to the ‘flip-flop’ of seeing a classic tale or myth from the point of view of the adversary, there is a long and honorable tradition of this, going back at least as far as Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’– as Blake observed, Milton was of the Devil’s party, even if he didn’t know it.

Other examples: the Labyrinth story, as seen from the Minotaur’s point of view (Borges); Kafka’s father answering his son’s ‘Letter’ (Doris Lessing); most famously, John Gardner’s ‘Grendel’ where the epic of Beowulf is told from the perspective of the monster.

On a lower level are the ‘Orcs!’ series of novels, the Moriarty thrillers by the other John Gardner, and superhero comics in which the villain is the narrator — Lex Luthor (Jeph Loeb), Fu Manchu (Doug Moench), and Red Skull (Mark Waid — this trawl through the mind of a Nazi so disquieted the editors at Marvel that they heavily rewrote it.)

I feel appreciation for the subversive, deepening, balancing effects of such efforts, and their appeal to empathy.

What is the value of preserving Maleficent as an avatar of the female monstrous, the cthonic chaos-bringer?